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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Insofar as anything appears to us, it radiates itself.
Insofar as it radiates itself, it is light.
Insofar as it is light, it is the glory and beauty of God.
We need to wear dark glasses all the time so as not to be blinded by the light that blazes from everything.
Dark glasses, or eyes as bright as the world around us.
(Inspired by the closing section of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 8:42 am
Thomas (ST II-II, 2, 7) argues that every saved person, including Adam, had explicit knowledge of the incarnation of Christ: “the object of faith includes, properly and directly, that thing through which man obtains beatitude. Now the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion is the way by which men obtain beatitude . . . . Therefore belief of some kind in the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation was necessary at all times and for all persons.”
Yet the content and shape of the belief in the Incarnation differed according to differences of times and persons.” Prior to his sin, Adam “believed explicitly in Christ’s Incarnation,” but only in a specific respect: “in so far as it was intended for the consummation of glory, but not as it was intended to deliver man from sin by the Passion and Resurrection.” For Thomas, then, not only was Adam destined to be consummated with a glory that he did not yet possess, but this hope for glory required “Christ’s Incarnation.”
How could Adam have known this? Thomas points to Paul’s quotation from Genesis 2:24 in Ephesians 5:32, and particularly to Paul’s comment that “this is a great sacramentum . . . in Christ and the church.” Thomas comments, “it is incredible that the first man was ignorant about this sacrament.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 6:54 am
Berry again, waxing prophetic, and thanks again to Ken Myers.
“In denying the holiness of the body and of the so-called physical reality of the world—and in denying support to the good economy, the good work, by which alone the Creation can receive due honor—modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology or ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is, for example, a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious (and vaguely romantic) emotion.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:55 am
In God and the Crisis of Freedom
Prevenient grace is no theological anomaly, but the natural order of the world.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 9:01 am
Thomas (ST II-II, 2, 3) asks whether faith is necessary for salvation or the “perfection” of human nature. Citing Hebrews 11:6, he concludes, of course, that faith is necessary, and in the process argues that rational creatures reach perfection not only “in what belongs to it in respect of its nature, but also in that which it acquires through a supernatural participation in Divine goodness.” This seems a very un-de-Lubacian Thomas.
But I think the argument mostly confirms de Lubac.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 6:27 am
Anatolios sums up a wonderful exposition of Nyssa’s epistemology with this: “The distinctive character of Gregory’s epistemology . . . lies not so much in delimiting the extent of information that can be gleaned by the mind (he insists there is no limit) as in locating the act of knowledge radically within the movement of receptivity and wonder. . . . Authentic and understanding contact with reality accepts its own irreducible stance of receptivity with regard to the always prior self-presenting dynamism of the being that is known. Instead of claiming to supercede or overreach that dynamism, the one who seeks to know stretches herself out toward the unfathomable depths of the active source of a being’s self-presenting dynamism of power. . . . The crucial distinction is that between a comprehensive knowledge in which the mind masters its object and the doxological knowledge enacted in worship. The former claims to enclose the known object by the mind’s grasp; the latter seeks to stretch out (epekteino) into the infinitely open expanse of divine glory.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 12:48 pm
In de officiis 1.28, Ambrose mentions some who “considered it consonant with justice that one should treat common, that is, public property as public, and private as private.” He rejects the position: “this is not even in accord with nature.”
He elaborates in terms of a doctrine of creation that overlaps with Stoicism: “for nature has poured forth all things for all men for common use. God has ordered all things to be produced, so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be a common possession for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few. Here, too, we are told that the Stoics taught that all things which are produced on the earth are created for the use of men, but that men are born for the sake of men, so that mutually one may be of advantage to another.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 11:19 am
Khaled Anatolios points out in his Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine
Athanasius is challenging the “framework of debate” that contrasts “trinitarian conceptions of unity of being versus those of unity of will.” He and his opponents both accept that creation is a result of God’s will, but Athanasius presses the point: “if the Son is the agent of the divine willing of creation, he must be integral to divine being in order for this willing to be properly owned by the divine being.” The sovereignty of God’s will, in short, is only properly affirmed Trinitarianly: God’s sovereignty as Creator “is ultimately only affirmed by recognizing the Son’s sharing in divine being.”
Question: Have Calvinists always recognized this?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early Church, between the ‘now’ and the ‘to come,’ between the ‘old’ and the ‘new,’ with an orderly, stable, and essentially extra-temporal distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural,’ between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’; and then, in order to assure God’s total transcendence, it viewed grace itself not as God’s very presence but as a created ‘medium.’”
As a result, “Eschatology . . . became exclusively ‘futuristic,’ the Kingdom of God a reality only ‘to come’ but not to be experienced now as the new life in the Holy Spirit, as real anticipation of the new creation. Within this new theological framework, ‘this world’ ceased to be experienced as passage, as ‘end’ to be transfigured into ‘beginning,’ as the reality where the Kingdom of God is ‘at hand.’ It acquired a stability, almost a self-sufficiency, a meaning of its own, guaranteed to be sure by God (causa prima, analogia entis [Schmemann the Barthian!]), yet at the same time an autonomous object of knowledge and understanding. For all its ‘other-worldliness,’ the Latin medieval synthesis was based on the alienation of Christian thought from its eschatological source, or to put it more bluntly on its own ‘secularization.’” Before secularization in the narrow sense, “the ‘world’ in the West was secularized by Christian thought itself.”
Schmemann’s focus is on medieval Christianity, and his analysis holds best there. Eschatology was recovered by the Reformation, but over the centuries the Reformation became “re-Westernized,” and today the secularizing nature/grace scheme is seen as the essence of Protestantism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Peter James (Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Chronology of Old World Archaeology
Sounds right to me.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, October 24, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Jonathan Edwards writes in his Personal Narrative about his delight in nature, and then went off into an allegorical reverie: “The soul of the true Christian . . . appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing as it were in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosom, to drink in the light of the sun. For no part of creature holiness had I so great a sense of loveliness, humility, brokenness of heart and poverty of spirit; and there was nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this, to lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that God might be ALL, that I might become as a little child.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Ephrem the Syrian on Genesis 1: “The Holy Spirit warmed the waters with a kind of vital warmth, even bringing them to a boil through intense head in order to make them fertile. The action of a hen is similar. It sits on its eggs, making them fertile through the warmth of incubation. Here then, the Holy Spirit foreshadows the sacrament of holy baptism, prefiguring its arrival, so that the waters made fertile by the hovering of the same divine Spirit gave birth to the children of God.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Bavinck says, in defense of the necessity of anthropomorphism, that “We simply must acknowledge that even thought our finite understanding of God is limited, it is no less true! We possess exhaustive knowledge of very little; all reality, including the visible and physical, remains something of a mystery to us. Our talk of spiritual matters, including those of our own souls, is necessarily metaphorical, figurative, poetic. But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect. On the contrary, real poetry is truth, for it is based on the resemblance, similarity and kinship that exist between different groups of phenomena. All language participates in this rich interpenetration of visible and invisible. if speaking figuratively were untrue, all our thought and knowledge would be an illusion and speech itself impossible.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 12, 2011 at 4:39 pm
The Farrer quotations come pouring in. OK, trickling. Here’s one from a reader, Jeff Peterson:
“Man, once endowed with speech, starts making an inventory of the universe. The speaker, having labelled everything else, labels himself, and becomes an item on his own list. He is now no more than a pebble on the beach, a part of the description he constructs; he falls under the net of an impartial rule, an equal justice binding on himself as much as on his neighbour. That justice is the child of speech, is evident; less evident, perhaps, that charity is; but no less true. If I talk, I can give a description of the world in which I am not the centre. But equally, if I talk, I can give a description in which my neighbour is; can make him a focus, an eye, a heart, a man round whom the universe revolves; another self, an object of sympathy and concern. He is the centre of things, just as much as I; but if so, neither he, nor I, nor any other man is the centre. Speech makes a further advance, and spins a story in which our fellow creatures and we are equally the characters; and having reached that level, is found to be saying over, however haltingly, the speech of that creative Word, who commands the existence, and assigns the parts of us all.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 3:42 am
In City of God 5.11, Augustine rhapsodizes concerning the works of God the Triune Creator. His works are works of gift-giving. Three times Augustine uses the verb “gave” (dedit), and the gifts go from angels to men to animals to seeds to stones, and include intellectual gifts, beauty, health, fruitfulness, sensation, memory, desire.
And none has he left in dissonance: From heaven to the smallest creatures God has given everything “a harmony and, as it were, a peace among its parts” (qui non solum caelum et terram, nec solum angelum et hominem, sed nec exigui et contemptibilis animantis viscera nec avis pinnulam, nec herbae flosculum nec arboris folium sine suarum partium convenientia et quadam veluti pace dereliquit). Cicero defines the key term convenientia as the equivalent of conjunctio and the Greek sympatheian (Div. 2.60.124), and elsewhere speaks of it as rerum in amicitia.
From the harmony of God with His Son and Spirit comes the harmony of each thing with itself and each with all. From the God of peace comes peace.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 11:43 am
Barth says or implies that human language is “in itself” inadequate to the task of bearing God’s revelation. It has to be commandeered in order to become the vehicle of revelation. Language “can only be the language of the world” though we must have confidence that “contrary to the natural capabilities of this language, it can and should speak of God’s revelation in this language as theological language.”
So too his hesitations about the vestigia Trinitatis: Creation lacks the natural capabilities of manifesting the Trinity, but the creation might be commandeered to that purpose.
But what does this notion of “natural capabilities” of language mean? Is language a merely human invention? Does language have some reality that makes it inherently resistant to God’s purpose? Why?
As often, and as Van Til recognized in his much-maligned critique of Barth, there is an deeply embedded nature/supernature dualism going on in Barth. Gotta love Barth, but it’s there.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 11:35 am
Song of Songs 8:6-7: Put me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, jealousy is as severe as Sheol; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers overflow it; if a man were to give all the riches of his house for love, it would be utterly despised.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, in Your relentless love, You wear our names on Your heart, and raise Your right arm in our defense. We pray that You would pour that same fierce love into our hearts by Your Spirit, so that we might love you and one another with the unquenchable love that is strong as death. Amen.
You each hold a candle. Everything that needs to be said about your wedding and your marriage is summed up in that fact: You each hold a candle. In fact, nearly everything that needs to be said about everything is summed up in that fact: You each hold a candle at your wedding, and in that we glimpse the origin and destiny of all things.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 10:01 am
Verhey has a nice discussion of the nature/supernatural distinction that locates the difference in eschatology. He points out, for starters, that “the regularities of the world we name as ‘natural laws” are not regularities of a self-contained machine but rather then ways God ordinarily works. As God acted freely and purposefully in creating the world, bringing things into existence and endowing them with causal powers of their own, so God acts freely and purposefully in sustaining the creation, sustaining things and their powers of causation, concurring in their existence and in the exercise of their own powers, their fertile free otherness.” Nicely said.
He also notes the differences that have arisen over the centuries in the understanding of the nature/supernatural distinction.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 1, 2011 at 4:05 pm
In his discussion of the “Baconian project” in his recent Nature and Altering It
Verhey notes that the Baconian myth assumes that “The natural order and natural processes have no dignity of their own; their value is reduced to their utility to humanity. And nature does not serve humanity ‘naturally.’ Nature threatens to rule and ruin humanity. The fault that runs through our world and through our lives must finally be located in nature. In the myth of the Baconian project, nature is the enemy. . . . In this myth technology becomes the faithful savior.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 1, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Human labor is an imitation of and participation in the creative work of God, and fulfilling human labor has the same structure as God’s creative work. We take hold of the world, tear it apart, reassemble it, give it a new name, and then evaluate the products of our labor (as James Jordan has pointed out). Fulfilling labor has its telos in Sabbath.
“Sabbath” here not only means “ceasing” but “enjoyment.” At the end of the creation week, God saw that it was all “very good” and rested in the satisfaction of a job well done. When human labor falls short of Sabbath, it produces frustration and alienation rather than fulfillment. A worker on an assembly line who spends a lifetime performing one tiny task over and over again has a more limited experience of Sabbatical satisfaction than the craftsman who sees a project through from start to finish.
Of course, large-scale production requires masses of workers doing relatively small tasks; a single craftsman cannot product a Boeing 777. But assembly-line work can be fulfilling if the workers are aware that they are part of a larger project. Being a member of a production team, like being a cast member in a play, can be highly rewarding, and even the most repetitive work can bring satisfaction in that context. The problem is that many larger corporations fail to give employees any sense of being part of a larger whole, and this is especially true when the employee’s employment is precarious. How is a worker supposed to experience the social satisfactions of labor when he’s never sure if he’ll be part of the team for the next project? It is like being in Egypt; it is like bricks without straw, labor without Sabbath.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 5:33 am
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